Sunday, November 20, 2022

Conscious Notebook :first few pages

 


The conscious notebook

                         

                    

A narrative human ontolOGY





Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

New York










Contents



Rakesh Biswas

Preface        i

Introduction        iii

The Conscious Notebook    vii

Prologue        ix

Chapter 1    Introducing Darkness    1

Chapter 2    Once the Threads are Set…Must Continue to Weave    3

Chapter 3    Story of Samsara    5

Chapter 4    The Class…. Hard Clinical Analyses or a Bit of Velvet, Warm Tea    7

Chapter 5    Samsara’s Break- A New Life Format    9

Chapter 6    To All Members of this Mailing List    11

Chapter 7    Re: To All Members of this Mailing List    13

Chapter 8    Con Human Interface    15

Chapter 9    Con’s Battery Powered Notebook    17

Chapter 10    An Email to His Star Readers from Sutra    19

Chapter 11    A Collective Consciousness in your Mail Box    21

Chapter 12    Lets be Natural Numbers    23

Chapter 13    The Serpent Boss    25

Chapter 14    A Zillion Snoopings…Hidden Files    27

Chapter 15    The Night of the Bed of Flowers    29

Chapter 16    Pecking at those Thought Keys    31

Chapter 17    Why Teach an Old Con New…    33

Chapter 18    From Sutra’s Readers    35

Chapter 19    Pollinating for their Collective Bud    37

Chapter 20    An Idiot Con’s Guide to Humans    39

Chapter 21    The Failed Editor in Cheap    41

Chapter 22    A Non Pharmacological Baul Technique    43

Chapter 23    From the Class to Hardware Lab… Changing Domains    45

Chapter 24    Hardware Intensive Care    47

Chapter 25    Down to Earth Human Notebooks    49

Chapter 26    The Drowning Differentials    51

Chapter 27    Creation: Assembling from Junk    53

Chapter 28    First Rain Last Night; Poo-Wee, Yuck, Drat…End of an Illusion of Eternal Spring    55

Chapter 29    Anatomy- Hardware Junk Lab    57

Chapter 30    Spring, Finally, Overnight BLOOM!!!!!!!.    59

Chapter 31    Whatever You Wish is What you Get    61

Chapter 32    Needed Urgent: Passionate Lover for a Bored Wife    63

Chapter 33    Falling into a Different Dream    65

Chapter 34    Swiss Cheese Home Delivered    67

Chapter 35    Neonatal Antics…LCD Dreams    69

Chapter 36    Gaming...Daily Kicking the Invisible Football Amidst Us    71

Chapter 37    A Mound of Honey Tipped Neurocortices    73

Chapter 38    A Lot to Weave, Figure Out, Juggle    75

Chapter 39    Anatomy and Physiology of Relationships    77

Chapter 40    The Decision Tree    79

Chapter 41    An Ole Crone, Grizzled and Rawboned    81

Chapter 42    Letting You Into our Whirlwind    83

Chapter 43    Really, a Whoooowhoooooowhooooooo am i Time, it has Been    85

Chapter 44    Separating the Mind from its Silicon Chips    87

Chapter 45    Network Topology of the Narrative    89

Chapter 46    From a Death Ravine    91

Chapter 47    To Life Divine    93

Chapter 48    Buying and Selling Cons in a Global Market    95

Chapter 49    A Story about the Birth of One    97

Chapter 50    Words and Ideas    99

Chapter 51    Smashed to Smithereens...Picking up Memory Fragments    101

Chapter 52    Like Fruit Bats in the Moonlight Gleaming    103

Chapter 53    A Fragmented Con in Small Things    105

Chapter 54    Identifying and Plucking Leaves in the Evidence Jungle    107

Chapter 55    Principles of External-Internal Medicine    109

Chapter 56    Add-Ons to Consciousness    111

Chapter 57    A Mediaeval Specialty Clinic    113

Chapter 58    The Medical Grocery Shop    115

Chapter 59    Quest for Chemical Individuality    117

Chapter 60    Listening to Patients and Teachers Alike    119

Chapter 61    A Young Alcoholic Cirrhotic    121

Chapter 62    Bedside Troubleshooting: A Systems Approach    123

Chapter 63    Summarizing Livers and Rivers Within    125

Chapter 64    Discussing the Whole    127

Chapter 65    The Pump that Runs our Rivers    129

Chapter 66    Behind a Failing Pump: The Ailing Person    131

Chapter 67    System Trouble: A Yellowed Display Virus    133

Chapter 68    The Inoculated System    135

Chapter 69    The Letter from a Virus 1-5    137

Chapter 70    Hunger for Food and Air    143

Chapter 71    Airways Opening into System-Rivers    145

Chapter 72    Moving Muscles and Stories    147

Chapter 73    Possibilities Jumping and Quivering    149

Chapter 74    Seems as if it was just the Other Day    151

Chapter 75    Like a Whiff of Rain Swept Earth    153

Chapter 76    Eeeeek, or Should it be Mmmmmmmmmmf...I Sniff Some Pain,
A Deep Breath or Two    155

Chapter 77    House Plants Cruising through Summers Bliss    157

Chapter 78    Piercing Individual Universes    159

Chapter 79    Waiting for the Mountain    161

Chapter 80    Flying in a Magic Carpet    163

Chapter 81    Bird Billions, Beeping Tweeting Whistling with the River-Tunes    165

Chapter 82    The Birding Resident    167

Chapter 83    The Bronchial Tree    169

Chapter 84    Evaluating Mechanical Trouble Shooting Skills    171

Chapter 85    On Failing the Acid Test    173

Chapter 86    Searching...Searching Yellow Eyes    175

Chapter 87    The Train Journey 1-3    177

Chapter 88    On Being a Medical Student 1    181

Chapter 89    On Being a Medical Student 2    183

Chapter 90    Macchapucchare College of Medicine    185

Chapter 91    Settling Down to a New Dream    187

Chapter 92    The Story of Glomerular Injury 1-7    189

Chapter 93    Going Up and Down Tops and Bottoms    199

Chapter 94    Fever Bugs in System-Rivers    201

Chapter 95    The Cranky Irritable Bowel    203

Chapter 96    A Dysfunctional Dyspeptic Stomach    205

Chapter 97    Setting Gas Purely Unconditionally Free    207

Chapter 98    A Blackening Lady    209

Chapter 99    A Web Based Doctor Patient Relationship    211

Chapter 100    All Humans are Born Physicians    215

Chapter 101    A Disc Full of Love    217

Chapter 102    Yours Sneeringly, Cheerio, Cornflakes, Grits    219

Chapter 103    Yes! I Do.    221

Chapter 104    The Last Honeymoon with the Mountains    223

Chapter 105    Regardless, We Continue...New or Renewed Track    225

Chapter 106    Also Saw a Bit of the Himalayas    227

Chapter 107    Fly to Kolkata then Fry    229

Chapter 108    Conversations with a Mountain    231

Chapter 109    Becoming the Mountain    233

Chapter 110    The Poor Old Rich Man    235

Chapter 111    An Oncogene Named Desire    237

Chapter 112    A Global Malignancy    239

Chapter 113    A Bad Dream    241

Chapter 114    Trees: Like Receptors in our Body    243

Chapter 115    Apoptosis: Perishing Great Civilizations    245

Chapter 116    Cremation-Incinerating Junk    247

Epilogue        249

Acknowledgements    251

References        253






Preface




Present trend in computer ontology is toward the development of artificial intelligence and human ontology is an intervention to positively support it with natural human intelligence such that it is infused with the pluralism that characterizes human social structures. 

This book plans to make a beginning toward that end utilizing a meta-narrative that examines the life of an academically failed physician and his relatively academically successful daughter. The short individual narrative beads that are threaded into this larger narrative represent a multi genre science and fantasy of medicine. On one hand it balances a postmodern stance with its incredulity toward absolute evidence based truth on the other a tolerant pluralism that simply recognizes all approaches as credible as long as the resultant is geared toward positive outcomes.

The book portrays a non-linear narrative ontology interspersed in linear discourses on its relevance to human cognition and ontology. It creates a fictional conceptual model of a human that is visualized in physical form analogous to a notebook computer that hides an infinite backend process of cognition analogous to the human mind driven by its consciousness.

This particular backend entity is labeled con (shortened from a consciousness that is universal to all humans and other sentient life also sometimes represented simply as being) and is fictionally endowed with powers that enable it to run on multiple notebook computers (analogous or metaphorically morphologically indistinguishable from humans). This helps the meta-narrative to explore human cognition and its physical manifestations in an Earthly plain. 

The story line begins with Con taking the plunge with his notebook June into an Earthy material life. A plunge that makes him fall through life and is bound to end in death. Death smashes his notebook’s hard disc into tiny bits and pieces. The nonlinear narrative as a result tries to pick up these broken fragments of memory and brings out Con’s journey through the human body (in its tree like statistical self-similarity with the Earth and the universe, which may be represented in an atom). It portrays microcosmic interactions inside the human body at a macrocosmic level of day to day living on an Earthy scale. 

Con becomes well versed with the anatomy and circuitry of the various intricate components of his machine but also realizes that it has developed in an evolving assembly line whose creators are long dead and nobody till date understands perfectly how the damn thing works. However there are theories, stories of atoms and molecules and their subatomic families regularly utilized to explain how semi conductor chips work inside our bodies. Throughout the ages, stories take on multicolored hues, theories on the nature of Con, Earth and self-evolving machines…the science is ever changing.









To all the dead bodies who taught us anatomy

To all our patients who taught us medicine

To all systems that need trouble shooting

Living or non living, sleek, shining, functional or worn, withered and junked


Sutra














We believe that the cognitive sciences have reached a situation in which they have been frozen into one narrow form by the machine metaphor. There is a need to thaw that form and move from a reductionist, atemporal, disembodied, static, rationalist, emotion and culture-free view, to fundamentally richer understandings that include the primacy of action, intention, emotion, culture, real-time con straints, real-world opportunities, and the peculiarities of living bodies.

Walter J. Free man and Rafael Núñez

Restoring to Cognition the Forgotten Primacy of Action, Intention and Emotion,

Imprint Academic 1999.







 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'You are not your body, but the witness, the consciousness of the body. Not
any of your thoughts or feelings but the witness, the
consciousness of your thoughts and feelings. '

 

--Line from, “The Mandukya Upanishad”. 

 

The Upanishads (translated by Swami Prabhananda 1970). Hollywood, Calif.:
Vedanta Press. 1978.









Introduction


What on Earth is Human Ontology?


The traditional goal of ontological inquiry is to divide the world "at its joints," to discover those fundamental categories or kinds that define the objects of the world. (IDEF5 methods report 1994). What ontology has in common with both computer science and philosophy is the representation of entities, ideas, and events, along with their properties and relations and the rules that govern them, according to a system of categories. (“Ontology-computer science”, 2007) An often-quoted definition of ontology in computer science is that it is an explicit specification of a conceptualization restricted to different domains. (Gruber 1993). 

For example if one has to write an ontology of driving a car it would involve representation and retrieval of data specifying certain concepts related to controlling the wheel, clutch, brake as well as concepts of objects such as road on which the car needs to be driven and characters such as trees, other cars and people that need to be avoided.

In human ontology, the ontologic domain is existence itself and for an individual sustaining that existence his/her personal ontology is his/her personal conceptualization (although rarely explicitly specified and this is where the similarity to computer ontology ends) of the roadmap he would need to drive himself through that existence and the objects s/he would meet on that road that s/he would need to know how to deal with. A computer ontology program for car driving may not actually drive a car unless connected to a robotic system but would likely be able to answer queries on car driving. In most humans substantial portion of the knowledge on car driving may however remain tacit where the body may know how much pressure to exert on the accelerator to attain a certain speed but for the individual may become difficult to tell. Instances where explicit specifications of conceptualizations are difficult to attain simulate real world human interactions where substantial outcomes are achieved in a tacit manner. (Biswas 2008)

Human ontology (a product of natural evolution) unlike computer ontology (artificially created by humans) is a remarkably heterogeneous cognitive phenomenon varying widely from human to human depending on genetic and environmental factors. It is a less explicit specification of individual concepts so much so that the term human ontology is a contradiction (unless it is just used to label neutral specifications for understanding human anatomy with an aim of building the healthcare framework around it). Admittedly the validity of claims labeling human creations as artificial is also debatable.

Yet humans do share cognitive constructs utilizing natural language that are expressed or stored as representations of entities, ideas, and events, along with their properties and relations and the rules that govern them, according to a system of categories (this is again what ontology is about although in humans it may not be explicitly stated as for computers). 

Other contemporary views from authors such as Peter Wilberg deny human ontology as a cognitive process at all. Wilberg maintains that the inner human being cannot be reduced to a set of bodily processes or cognitive behaviours. The inner human being is not some bodily ‘thing’ at all but ‘some-one’: a being. According to Wilberg, human ontology creates a fundamental distinction between the human body and mind on the one hand, and the inner human being on the other. (Wilberg 2007) 

Health as a personal experience is an individual phenomenon – patients understand and experience their health in the context of their social networks. People and events simultaneously make up these networks; structurally they are interconnected and functionally interrelated – and as such interdependent. (Bar-Yam 1997)

Over time individual patients therefore build their unique conceptual models of their health and illness in the context of their experiences and everyday social interactions. Equally health professionals develop their main constructs of health and disease from the collective interactions with their colleagues in medical institutions. Frequently these constructs are devoid of the ‘white noise’ generated by the personal realities of patients, caregivers and other professionals. 

These personal individual views form the basis for the socio-cultural construct of health, illness and disease, and the culture of the health care system – these understandings are learnt, internalized and enacted. As Berger and Luckmann (1966) point out persons and groups interacting together in a social system, form over time, concepts or mental representations of each other's actions, and these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other.

This book illustrates the dynamic interactions between individual human ontologies utilizing multiple beads of individual narratives threaded into a meta-narrative in the background of healthcare and illness.



References


  1. Bar-Yam, Y. Dynamics of Complex Systems, Addison-Wesley, 1997.

  2. Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

  3. Gruber, T. R. (1993). A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications. Knowledge Acquisition, 5(2), 199-220.

  4. IDEF5 method report (1994) Retrieved Oct 7th 2007 from http://www.idef.com/pdf/Idef5.pdf.

  5. Wilberg, P. Human Ontology or human genomics. Downloaded from http://heidegger.org.uk/hum_ont_hum_gen.pdf.

  6. Ontology-computer science. (2007, Aug 12). In Wikipedia Retrieved oct 7th 2007 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_%28computer_science%29.

  7. Biswas, R, Martin, C.M., Sturmberg, J., Mukherji, K., Lee, E.W.H., Umakanth, S., and Kasthuri, A.S. (2008). Social cognitive ontology and user driven healthcare, Hatzipanagos, S. and Warburton, S. (Eds.), Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies, IGI Global Publishing (Feb 2009).












The Conscious Notebook






All works of fiction draw on real life data and the present work is no exception. The data has been meticulously distorted substantially to remove all possible real life links. Any resemblance to a real life person would be purely coincidental.





Reading tips for the diligent but gullible reader



The trick in this book is not to be diligently linear as this is a very non-linear narrative built within the framework of a scale-free network with the sections on the medical student and her father as the major hubs. You could start with the last chapter and even end somewhere in the middle if you want to but be sure to turn it rapidly and smell the ink (that is if you are reading a paper version) or just eye the contents (not on the table of contents) scrolling down slowly till you feel like reading the italicized quotes (if you are on your electronic version).




Consider a social network in which nodes are people and links are acquaintance relationships between people. It is easy to see that people tend to form communities, i.e., small groups in which everyone knows everyone. In addition, the members of a community also have a few acquaintance relationships to people outside that community. Some people, however, are so related to other people (e.g., celebrities, politicians) that they are connected to a large number of communities. Those people may be considered the hubs responsible for the small world phenomenon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network





Prologue


Who Wants to Join the Dance?


I don’t know where the audience for this sort of a narrative collection or assortment lurks at the moment unless they are reading this but then why would anyone want to read it is the question that I must first try to answer. Also in my role of the prologue deity I guess I need to explain why they might consider sitting through the entire assortment of narratives.

I don’t think I have to go further back in history than the cave men to search for this. Those were the good old days when primordial genes were discovering the joys of finding new expression in variety of human bodies that were beginning to work and think differently. Like one poor cave man would often be chided by his partner for not being able to pluck that bright red flower from the topmost branch of that tall tree, her friend’s partner (called husband in the middle ages) having beat him to it.

So he would begin to think of obtaining the flower by offering to trade that neat piece of stone he has shaped into a sharp and a sort of business is born. This goes on for centuries until it’s centralized into a governable currency and the modern market is born with the same underlying theme. Information as a commodity enters the market with the advent of the printing press and is presently threatening to leave with the advent of a world wide spidery market place. 

I believe the biggest return for any information monger is information itself. It may in the beginning seem a bit like flattery (when someone conveys their gratitude for the information you presented) but eventually settles down to becoming an interesting exchange where both interacting poles gain more and more information. 

Now, if one settles instead for getting rewarded in the form of a certain green kind of purchasing power then one simply manages to tire/burn oneself out. After all how much can you gorge with that puny body? In such situations the only hope of salvation is to open the floodgates of charity (albeit in a controlled manner) and achieve that equilibrium one strived and managed to lose in youth. 

The real market lies in our hearts where, in the light of the full moon, one can dance to the tunes of a cowherd’s flute, lilting the spirits of the jungle. The real buyer is one who can join the dance. In the end I must warn you, you are going to see more of the prologue deity barging in quite often in between the narrative.










Chapter 1




Introducing Darkness


Your article says, “Something out there holds swarms of galaxies together and keeps their stars from falling apart, but scientists still haven’t learnt what this invisible substance is.” Although I am familiar with many of the names of God, this is the first time I have heard Him called Dark Matter.

Clyde A. Bachelor

Letter to National Geographic, September 2005



What you see in front of you is not just darkness. It’s like you have no sight. Now imagine you aren’t hearing me either. There’s no sound except a soft drone, which drifts out from a deep black hole from time to time. Well… in such instances you might feel the soft rustle of air around or the saliva at the back of your tongue or become aware of the perfume your neighbor’s put on but lets think that you aren’t able to feel all this either…there’s just space, no atmosphere to speak of, no stars coming out, no taste or touch, none of the five senses at all. Our story begins right here where time stands still…no sound of my talking, no pin dropping only a drone which sounds vaguely like aum…hmmmmmmmmmm.

Welcome to the black hole of Nirvana…universal consciousness. I know it’s boring to be bereft of the senses especially when you know there’s a thriving world full of revelers right in this black hole, who are like ordinary human beings talking, listening, jostling, tickling each other, enjoying their beers, having sex, in short having a real good time. Another thirty seconds of silence in this heart of darkness and you will understand the predicament of Con, the hero of our story. He’s been holed up here since Con only knows what time…ages maybe but then again time here stands still…as if waiting.

Cons are actually ordinary people who had eaten the forbidden fruit on Earth. They wanted badly to merge into the main stream of universal consciousness, they also wanted peace and there was only one way out for them…unplug all sensory inputs from their system…with each and every bite on the apple, cut off all desires and reach the state in which all of you are now, if not for my incessant yapping. I shall stop here and leave you with nirvana for company just another 30 seconds…give you the feeling of what it’s like to be Con (alias God)…poor God. 


Tamas or Darkness in physical nature finds expression as gravity and inertial mass. In human nature it is felt essentially as a downward-pulling sense of inertia and heaviness. People search to compensate for Tamasic existence either through Rajas - hyperactivity and consumerism or mindless entertainment or through bland Sattvic states of spiritual harmony, peace and calm.

Peter Wilberg

The Gunas, 2007










Chapter 2




Once the Threads are Set…Must Continue
to Weave


All authors build on their own lives to tell their stories. They use their real life as an introduction to the characters and then sit back and watch their characters emerge with a life of their own. All this is done as part of this unique thought experiment called novel. 

Sutra



A note from Sutra:

I am not to be mistaken for the author himself. The author to relate his story is using me. My Bengali name is Sutra Dhar, which doesn’t necessarily mean storyteller but someone who threads and weaves a story. The things, which I relate, may happen in the real, the author’s world and the imaginary, reel…my world. I am a bridge between the two worlds. The picture in front of you shows a man crossing the street. He’s not the author or myself or even the sponsor for our story. He’s an ordinary nameless human, the focus of our story.

He is an ordinary man who’s weirdly fascinated by the ordinary people living around him in an extraordinary world. He revels in the stories churned out by their interactions with each other and the macro-microcosmic environment. He gorges on them daily as if they were a staple item in his daily diet of thought. I may not be the only storyteller on whom the author has bestowed sole right to voice his stories. There are others from the author’s world of ordinary people. You might wonder whether they are people at all. You might get to hear stories related by a virus, a red blood corpuscle or even a protein molecule masquerading as a snake or squirrel. Sometimes you might hear the lord almighty talking to you.  


Paradigms are fires lit by tiny sparks of individual thoughts that brighten up our worlds as a celebration and transform incendiary individuals into overnight life long celebrities. Society needs these glowing fires from its brightest stars to function effectively in a galactic space that is otherwise bereft of color and air in a back drop of intense all encompassing darkness—

Dhar S,

The influence of dominant paradigms in social functioning

(unpublished-retrieved from the dustbin folder).










Chapter 3




Story of Samsara


To come back again to the beginning of time, even before the sperm comet hit our ovum planet, let’s take a look at the source of our comet and planet. After all, the universe is just a collection of narrative matter strung together by time. –

Sutra



Samsara, which means the universe, is only one of the characters in this story. He wasn’t always bad in academics; in fact one should say he excelled in them. On leaving school, he managed to sail into the best technological institutes in the country, all because he had a way with mathematics. Numbers talked to him. They pulled at his hair, splashed water on him and teased him often sending him into frenzy…more so when he was presented with a problem, which was difficult and impossible for the average student. 

It was off course rare to find him tied down to problems, which he always liked to call challenges, as he would have solved most of them in a jiffy. Unfortunately he also bagged at the same time a seat in medical school as his aggregate in physics and chemistry gave him an edge even if his biology was just passable. His parents decided that as his elder brother was an engineer he had to be a doctor. 

His medical student days were spent in rigorous studies but recurrent failures. He wasn’t actually studying the subjects’ medical school demanded but almost everything else, which included lengthy tomes on theoretical physics, combinatorial chemistry and non-linear dynamics. He took a number of years more than the average medical graduate to pass his finals and barely managed to finish his internship. Most of his batch mates had long finished their residencies and fellowships becoming busy assistant professors of Cardiology, Gastroenterology and the like in prestigious universities. His school-mates way behind his mathematical abilities who had nevertheless got into engineering now held important positions in high tech academic institutes as well as the corporate sector. 

His parents had by now realized their mistake and come to terms with the fact that their son wouldn’t after all become a medical man even if he’d managed to scrape through medical school. They hoped he’d take up a government medical officer’s job. His cousin was doing well earning hefty bribes signing false post mortem reports. He had already built a bungalow, bought a car.

However Samsara Sen. was made of different fiber. He believed in following his bliss. He had toyed with the idea of appearing again for the technological Institutes entrance exams during his med school days but somehow was then too absorbed with theoretical physics to even bother about a career in engineering. He believed his bliss lay in talking to his beloved numbers…Listening all day to the melodious chatter of mathematics.


What drives us to learn? Is it our jest for reward in the form of feel good food for thought? We learn anything for these food for thought rewards and like animals in a circus seem to be constantly foraging for it.

Sutra